The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media

ABSTRACT

In a high-choice media environment, there are fears that individuals will select media and content that reinforce their existing beliefs and lead to segregation based on interest and/or partisanship. This could lead to partisan echo chambers among those who are politically interested and could contribute to a growing gap in knowledge between those who are politically interested and those who are not. However, the high-choice environment also allows individuals, including those who are politically interested, to consume a wide variety of media, which could lead them to more diverse content and perspectives. This study examines the relationship between political interest as well as media diversity and being caught in an echo chamber (measured by five different variables). Using a nationally representative survey of adult internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 2000), we find that those who are interested in politics and those with diverse media diets tend to avoid echo chambers. This work challenges the impact of echo chambers and tempers fears of partisan segregation since only a small segment of the population are likely to find themselves in an echo chamber. We argue that single media studies and studies which use narrow definitions and measurements of being in an echo chamber are flawed because they do not test the theory in the realistic context of a multiple media environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Echo chamber
• high-choice media environment
• political interest
• media diversity
• survey

Disclosure statement

The data collection was funded by Google as part of the Quello Search Project, although Google has had no access to this paper prior to publication.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Dubois (Ph.D. University of Oxford) in an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on political uses of digital media and political opinion formation [email: [email protected]].

Grant Blank (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is the Survey Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He is a sociologist specializing in the political and social impact of computers and the Internet, the digital divide, statistical and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. He can be reached at [[email protected]]; see also http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/blank/.

Notes

1 We choose to use the term ‘media environment’ to represent the collection of media available and their interactions. This is essentially the setting in which individuals make choices about their media use. Others use the terms ‘media ecosystem’ or ‘media ecology’, which emphasize the interrelated nature and importance of interactions among media in a system. For our purposes, we see these terms as roughly interchangeable with ‘media environment.’ Each term aims to capture the environment which individuals find themselves in, we select one for consistency.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was supported by Google as part of the Quello Search Project.